"All right action flows from the breath"
- Hajakujo

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Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Verse A - a poem in two parts.

find lately cannot I
mind troubled oft, oh my
reversed perhaps it was
a-verse to sense its lost.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Dendrites

If you see
a porcupine
then you have
dendritic spines
Given a-
ny other fact,
you will still
have them, at that.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Zizek in the Woods

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
but this wood is trackless, white and cold.
I passed through unwelcoming aliens
they shivered, echoed in me something old.
An enmity, a fear, another time, a signal
of homeostasis lost. Was it ever owned?
Ecology! Ecology! A murder of plastic,
we writhe in guilty ideology, humility sold.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Expression

In the sciences, we spend our lives looking for truth. In the end,we express our ideas in words,  interpreting numbers or proposing theories. Mendelsson said something like "words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite". When has a scientific tract, other than awakening insights which were close to fruitition anyway (or you could not have had them), arisen that special feeling of truth-in-beauty or beauty-in-truth?
Much of modern thought, scientific or otherwise, is algorithmic, modelling. Models are dead things, only brought to life through understanding. Without the audience, this play is dead. Maybe we should strive to write a script that lives, as the Homeric poets.
...

Can you make art? Make a beautiful thing today, for the sake of those of us who only make models.
Esperanza Spalding

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Nothing to say

How many things can be said in a way, that still allows that you have nothing to say?
How many phrases are put together, that never indicate a where or a whether?
How much bullshit will a man push out, and still never meet an ear of doubt?
How many words are there in this rhyme, how much information here in 4/4 time?
How long until the reader just stops, yeah how long how long this long tops...


                  OSU

Monday, February 14, 2011

Some W40k terrain

Been making ths for a while, finally finished painting it at the weekend.



OSU

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Synecdoche

It's a pity that my head is mine alone, or rather that the confluence of concepts and metaphors that occasionally arises when I get on a good streak of discovery cannot be shared, in such a way as to lend context to something that arrives CRASH and crystallises amorphous forms.

Here is a quote that does it nicely:

"This website considers the apparent one-to-one correspondences found between the characteristics resulting from simple dichotomous development and some of the modern models of reality, leading us to the probability that we have adapted to the, at least 'local', spacetime continuum by internalising at least one of it's characteristics - dichotomisation. And so the tendancy by some to see 'mind' in the formation of the universe, or to find 'truth' in esoteric maps is based solely on dichotomous analysis, and results from the projection of the proposed template out into the universe; the models of reality are based on metaphors which are models of our selves."

Whether we call it god, or science, or something else, we are looking at ourselves.

 OSU

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Language

Words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite - language is a by-product of our evolution of an extremely powerful capability to model the world, and thus manipulate it. Thus it is NOT a tool for communication - if anything, language is a hindrance to communication when it comes to concepts which we can know intuitively such as emotion. Only when we communicate abstract concepts, fixed, distant and eternal, are we really at an advantage using language. Even then, we must go to so much trouble to fix our definitions for mutual understanding, that a conversation without such fixing can be worse than useless. It isn't just that you don't know the terms from my field, but that the terms I use work from other metaphors. My perspective on the world, my model of it, is not yours and you can only communicate with me to advantage if you build a ground truth from the same metaphors. If this seems too rigid, if it seems that in your life you manage to communicate about your ideas quite well, remember that you live in a world where homogeneity of thought has been increasing for milennia. Try to imagine communicating your most sophisticated ideas to a Guarani indian. Or even just a randomly selected immigrant of different educational background.

Of course all this doesn't include so-called 'peripheral' forms of communication when using language, such as intonation, prosody and body language. These are actually deeper, closer to our true meaning (unless we dissemble). However pure prose, dissociated words, are fixed meaningless symbols manipulated to address real meanings.

Probably music is closer to an expression of our 'felt' reality than words.

                  OSU

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Internet Life

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

OEEE OE OE OE OEEE

                  OSU